conventionally, as the volume of traffic flowing through a network increases, power consumption of the entire network increases. The volume of traffic flowing into the network is expected to increase greatly, and thus it is required to reduce power consumption. Particularly, since an increase in power consumption of a router is large, it is required to reduce power consumption of the router.
As a technique of reducing power consumption, clock gating has been known. The clock gating is one of low power consumption techniques of hardware. In the clock gating, in order to reduce power consumption, a clock is not supplied to a circuit that does not need to operate, and transition of a signal is stopped. For example, the clock gating may be applied to the router in the network. In this case, the router that does not perform packet transmission enters a dormant state, thereby reducing power consumption.
Examples of the related art includes Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 01-011492, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 03-046432, and Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 11-503881
However, in the above-mentioned conventional technique, transition between the start state and the dormant state is frequently performed. Thus, there is a problem in that power consumption required when starting and stopping the apparatus increases. Specifically, in the present network, in order to avoid quality deterioration, the routing process is performed to disperse and transmit the traffic on the network.
Thus, if the clock gating is applied to the router on the network, since traffic transmission is frequently executed, transition between the start state and the dormant state is executed with a high frequency. As a result, power consumption required when starting and stopping the apparatus increases.